Tracing the Marxist Roots of the Assault on the Family

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Dr. Jerry Newcombe is a key archivist of the D. James Kennedy Legacy Library, a spokesman and cohost of Kennedy Classics.

Aristotle once said, "Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives." Is there a link to Karl Marx and his own abysmal failure as a family man and the all-out assault on the traditional family today?

Yes, says New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Paul Kengor, in his brand new book called Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage.

If you saw Dinesh D'Souza's first movie on Obama, then you have seen a cameo of Paul Kengor. He was discussing his book The Communist, which documents that President Obama as a young man was mentored by a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA.

Frank Marshall Davis was the "Frank" Obama mentions 22 times in his own memoir, Dreams of My Father. He started mentoring young Barack when the future president was nine years old. Davis also happened to be Communist Party USA member #47544.

None of this means that everyone currently supporting same-sex marriage or other alternatives to the traditional family, including the president, are communists. Of course not. But there is an historic link, and it ought to be known.

I spoke recently with Paul Kengor on my radio show, and he said that he wrote the book because he was looking for a book like it and couldn't find one. So he decided to write it.

Kengor said on my radio show: "I read People's World, the successor to the Daily Worker, every day. To see them suddenly so gung ho, celebrating LGBT pride month, constantly writing articles in support of gay marriage…to see even Castro's Cuba, where they used to throw gays in prison, to see them holding gay pride marches, signing onto gay marriage---I realized all of this makes sense when you see the left's 200 year effort to abolish the family, to redefine marriage, and to take down the natural, traditional, biblical marriage."

The father of Communism, Karl Marx (1818-1883), dared to teach the world how to conduct their financial affairs, but he couldn't run his own household and keep food on the table. He had a disastrous family life---both in his family of origin and then in his marriage. He lived in squalor as a leech off of his writing partner, Frederick Engels, who had inherited money.

Kengor notes that "Four of Marx's six children died before he did, and at least two of the daughters committed suicide, one of them reportedly in a suicide pact with her husband---a son-in-law that Marx ridiculed."

Kengor says this of the father of Communism's marriage: "…in 1862 Marx wrote a letter to Engels noting that every day his wife expressed a wish to die; such was her misery. In another letter to Engels during one of Marx's many financial crises, Marx asserted to his partner, 'Blessed is he who has no family.'"

Kengor told me, "Engels never got married. He refused to marry these poor women, his mistresses, who were begging him to marry them."

One of the tenets of the classic book Marx wrote with Engels in 1848, The Communist Manifesto, states: "Abolition of the Family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists."

Kengor notes how the results were devastating to the traditional family in the heyday of the Soviet Union, where Marxism was fully tried and found wanting. Divorce was rampant. Abortion was so common that for every live birth, there were about three abortions. Yet for decades, the USSR represented the future to many progressives from the West.

Many liberals in America bought into the Marxist notion that the traditional family was oppressive by nature. Kate Millett, a Columbia grad, and the author of the popular Sexual Politics, held a meeting with fellow liberals where they declared their goal to "destroy the family" in order to "destroy the American Patriarch."

How would they do this? The answer was "By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!"

Millett made the cover of Time as "the Mao Tse-Tung of Women's Liberation." Kengor quotes Millett's sister, years later, on the impact of this Marxist feminist pioneer: "I've known women who fell for this creed in their youth who now, in their fifties and sixties, cry themselves to sleep decades of countless nights grieving for the children they'll never have and the ones they coldly murdered…"

Takedown helps connect some crucial dots in this long struggle against God's design for the family.

Kengor notes that even if the Supreme Court "re-defines" marriage for all Americans, signing on to gay marriage for the whole country, they will still be defying (to paraphrase Jefferson) the laws of nature and of nature's God.

Dr. Jerry Newcombe is a key archivist of the D. James Kennedy Legacy Library and a Christian TV producer. He has also written or co-written 23 books, including The Book That Made America: How the Bible Formed Our Nation and (with D. James Kennedy), What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? His views are his own. www.jerrynewcombe.com